Titular Sees ... and S Teresa of Calcutta ... and episcopal werewolves

Foul weather here in Blighty today. The Weather Community tells us that there will be calamity, disaster, disorder. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, if not their five Aunties. For some reason, they have given the storm the title "Francis". (I bet Mr Ivereigh is hopping mad. He probably blames it on the malign influence of Converts.)

However, I will do what comes so easily to us poor old gentlemen: I shall hunker down, stay at home,  and meditate on how everything has deteriorated since yesteryear.

In yesteryear, when everything was so perfect, when I was a bonny baby being pushed around in my perambulator ... I just loved those glorious Episcopal Sees in partibus infidelium. What a joy to know that, in Tudor Exeter, there was William, Bishop of Hippo in partibus. How his Confirmation candidates must have hung upon his every word! How Henry Tudor must have feared his fulminations on the subject of the Civitas Dei!

I gurgled with glee.

Now that the Roman See has put a stopper to these titular delights, it is often hard to know whether some prelate is Anglican or Catholic. Take, for example, the Bishop of Much Wenlock. He is quite a source of bons mots. (Here's a choice example: "Facts are only steam which obscures the mirror of truth": reliably recorded by a Protonotary Apostolic, R A Knox).

Time was, when one could be fairly confident that such a gentleman would be an Anglican Suffragan Bishop (probably a close friend of the Bishop of Buckingham).

But now ... after seven decades of ecumenical rapprochement ... how can we be sure that he is not the latest member of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales? Perhaps, yet another Westminster auxiliary? Destined for Birmingham when Bernard gets Westminster?

Changing the subject to my next grumble: there are silly people on the internet complaining about somebody or other who has done a very sensible comparison of PF with S Pius X (possibly inspired by the rumours about the imminent encyclical Stuprandi Dominici Gregis)..

Oh dear. Does nobody nowadays ever read Plutarch? You'd better watch my Blog with trepidation, because I am preparing a major and definitive comparison of Pol Pot and Mother Teresa.

And finally ... there is a picture on the internet of Archbishop Hesse of Hamburg (didn't Hitler have a chum with this name?), whose mind (he desires us to know) is not closed to the possibility of wyminpriests. A man of the Future? More, I suggest, a man of the past. His chasuble is embroidered with the sort of cross that German military uniforms often bore during the Third Reich.

I bet he's a werewolf.

It's still raining.